Most live plants to be sold in a retail store environment are fragile and require special attention for packaging, shipment, storage, display, and/or sale. In order to survive, live plants should be given proper care and maintenance, including adequate lighting, regular watering, and protection from insects, fungus, and bacteria. Live plants should also be protected from handling by the retailer and the consumer. This combination of requirements has made live plants a difficult consumer product to package and market for purposes of sale through conventional self-service retail channels, such as gift, department, and grocery stores.
The plant package shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,118,890 provided solutions to many of the packaging problems faced by prior live plant retailers. This patent provides a sealed container which maintains a live plant in a moist environment without regular watering and protects the plant from insects, fungus, and bacteria. The container is transparent to allow light to be transmitted to the plant and to allow visual inspection of the plant. However, a live plant must be properly prepared before being packaged in the sealed container of the '890 patent.
In the past, this preparation consisted of adjusting the moisture content of the soil to a sufficiently low level, as by allowing the soil to naturally evaporate, and thereafter manually adding fertilizer, insecticide, and fungicide to the soil. The process of allowing a plant to naturally dry out and then manually adding treatment to the soil can be extremely time consuming and thus inefficient. Therefore, a need existed to provide a more efficient system for the treatment of live plants, and especially for the treatment of a live plant before being packaged in a sealed container in which the plant survives by providing the proper balance of moisture and nutrients prior to sealing the plant in the container.